[bestbits] [governance] Civil society transparency

[Jeremy Malcolm]

On 24/05/2015 11:57 pm, Ian Peter wrote:
> Secondly, I wonder how it would work in CS which has so many people
> who are basically acting as individuals rather than representatives of
> organisations. Many if not most of us also have non CS affiliations
> (eg membership of ISOC, business or governmental employees if we are
> cs volunteers, academic postings etc) so the “pure” CS rep is probably
> a bit hard to find. I am not sure what we would gain by having a
> register of all our multiple affiliations which would need regular
> updating to be of any use.  I think we need to ensure our major
> coalitions (BB, JNC, IGC, APC, NCSG) act transparently, and by and
> large I think they do. But I am not sure of the value of extending
> this to what is probably tens of thousands of members or organisations
> affiliated with these larger groups.

Agreed.  I also feel that it's a misplaced priority.  If any of us
actually had enough influence to being making significant impacts on
policy, then the expenditure of time and resources on self-policing
ourselves in this fashion might make some sense.  But since we have
enough difficulty as it is just with being heard, let alone having an
impact, it just seems a real misallocation of scarce resources for us to
be placing ourselves under the microscope like this, especially since
nobody but ourselves is raising the question.  Instead of a register,
there are already voluntary transparency pledges that one can adopt (eg
the INGO Accountability Charter,
http://www.ingoaccountabilitycharter.org/).  Anything heavier than that
is, I feel, difficult to justify.

Also, take note of this article (from the left, by the way), criticising
efforts to enforce formal accountability standards on civil society
organisations:

http://hapinternational.org/pool/files/ngos,-civil-soc.pdf

-- 
Jeremy Malcolm
Senior Global Policy Analyst
Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://eff.org
jmalcolm at eff.org

Tel: 415.436.9333 ext 161

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